Why Hussein? The invasion of Iraq was based on the claim that the Iraqi dictator held weapons of mass destruction, and thus posed a clear and present danger to this country and the world. Those who wanted a war played up the threats to manufacture political support. We now know that there were no WMD; we were rushed into war under false pretenses. The result, most agree, was disastrous. Here's the lesson I hope we all learned: a false diagnosis, inflated to provoke extreme, hasty action, leads to bad outcomes. Something very similar to the WMD claims seems to characterize our approach to the World Conference of International Telecommunications (or WCIT, pronounced "wicket").

The linkage of powerful information technology to free, open, global communications makes gigantic contributions to civilization and commerce. And it was the Internet - the ability to network computers across borders, free from nation-state controls and permissions - that opened up this new world for us. If that is truly threatened by WCIT, it is indeed something to rise up about.

But the claim that the revision of the International Telecommunication Regulations constitutes a mortal threat to the future of the Internet is absurd. It is even less plausible than the claim that Hussein was harboring WMD.

The simple fact is that the WCIT cannot possibly undo the Internet revolution unless all the governments involved, including the United States, agree to do so. The International Telecommunications Union has no police force, no army. It cannot make any state do something it doesn't want to do. It cannot even fine or tax corporations. There is no Internet-WMD hidden in its stately offices in Geneva. Internet governance is not even the main target of the current WCIT negotiations.

The biggest threats to Internet freedom today do not come from intergovernmental organizations. They come from national governments with the institutional mechanisms to regulate, restrict, surveil, censor and license Internet suppliers and users. National governments have police forces, armies - and armies of regulators. This includes, especially, our own government, which has greater global reach than any other state.

As for China and Russia, they do not need the International Telecommunications Union or the union's WCIT to restrict their citizens' communications and use of the Internet. They are already doing it.

So why is so much attention being focused on a relatively obscure Internet governance process? Aren't there other, more important, things to worry about? Before getting exercised about WCIT, here are some things we need to ask our own government:

-- What are the long-term implications of our development and release of dangerous cyber weapons such as Stuxnet? Could U.S. initiatives lead to militarization or national partition of the Internet?

-- If we want to keep governments' hands off the Internet, why has the U.S. Commerce Department insisted on giving the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) Governmental Advisory Committee - whose members are exactly the same as the International Telecommunication Union's - more authority over domain-name policy, including the power to object to any new top-level domain names it doesn't like?

-- If we want to keep governments' hands off the Internet, why is our Federal Communications Commission proposing to tax foreign telecom carriers to subsidize universal service in this country?

-- Will there be any limits to the orgy of surveillance that domestic law enforcement agencies are conducting through the mobile-phone system? (The New York Times has reported that cell phone carriers responded to 1.3 million government demands for subscriber information last year.) Will this surveillance be extended to the global domain name system via ICANN, which collects contact information when a domain name is registered, as U.S. law enforcement agencies are currently demanding?

-- Will the defeated Stop Online Piracy Act legislation return, or will there be any similar attempts to flex regulatory muscles internationally on behalf of big copyright owners? Should we be as worried about the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Motion Picture Association of America as we are about the International Telecommunications Union?

-- Will the United States continue to intensify its leverage over financial choke points as an instrument of Internet policy, as exhibited in the cases of online gambling and WikiLeaks? Are these centralized regulatory tools consistent with the Internet model of decentralized control?

Sure, the International Telecommunications Union is a pre-Internet bureaucracy and some of its member-states would love to restrict communications or protect their local monopolies from Internet-based competition. But those kinds of threats existed before the WCIT and will continue after it.

I am less worried about what will happen in Dubai than I am about what is happening in Washington.

The Internet, decoded

The globally linked computer and server technology we call the Internet is engineered, governed and regulated by a multitude of players:

FCC: Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. federal agency that regulates interstate and international telecommunications and allocates U.S. civilian use of the radio frequency spectrum.

ICANN:International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private nonprofit that develops global policies for Internet domain names and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Participation is open. ICANN's authority comes from a contract with the U.S. Commerce Department.

IGF: United Nations Internet Governance Forum. An open, nonbinding forum that meets annually to allow global Internet governance issues to be debated and discussed by government, business and civil society - on equal terms.

IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force, the technical standards development body for the Internet. Started in 1985 as an informal meeting of engineers, it now is incorporated under the aegis of the Internet Society, a nonprofit. Its voluntary standards are developed in open working groups and are freely accessible online.

ITU: International Telecommunication Union is the world's oldest intergovernmental treaty organization, formed in the 1860s to facilitate interconnection of Europe's telegraph systems. Headquartered in Geneva, it has evolved into a place to develop global technical standards, interconnection arrangements among telephone companies, and policies for coordinating radio frequency use among nations.

ITRs: International Telecommunication Regulations. An international treaty negotiated via the ITU to manage the way national telephone companies interconnect, cooperate and compensate each other financially. The regulations have not been updated since 1988 - before the Internet era began. They consist of 22 pages of rules, followed by a long list of reservations by 73 different governments.

MPAA: Motion Picture Association of America. A trade association and lobby for the American motion picture, home video and television industries. Its membership is composed of the six major U.S. motion picture studios: Disney, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Brothers.

SOPA: Stop Online Piracy Act. A law proposed in Congress that attacked foreign-based websites alleged to be selling copyright-infringing movies, music and other products by mandating a system of Internet domain blocking technically similar to China's.

WCIT: World Conference of International Telecommunications. A meeting of the ITU members to renegotiate the ITRs.

WIPO: World Intellectual Property Association. Like the ITU, it's an intergovernmental treaty organization; unlike the ITU, it services patent, copyright and trademark holders rather than telecommunications companies.

W3C: World Wide Web Consortium. A private-sector body that develops standards for websites.

Milton L. Mueller is a professor at Syracuse University School of Information Studies. Send your feedback to us through our online form at sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1